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Episode: How to design teams that don’t suck

Author: TED
Duration: 00:37:43

Episode Shownotes

Too many teams are less than the sum of their parts, and building a great team requires more than just picking an all-star roster or doing trust falls. Adam dives into the hard-hitting research on what makes teams work — with members of the “Miracle on Ice" Olympic hockey team

and organizational behavior professor Anita Woolley. You’ll also hear some special tape from Adam’s late mentor Richard Hackman, a leading expert on teams. Available transcripts for WorkLife can be found at go.ted.com/WLtranscripts

Summary

In this episode of 'WorkLife with Adam Grant', organizational psychologist Adam Grant discusses how effective team design outweighs mere dynamics. Using the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team's victory as a case study, he emphasizes the importance of shared experiences, clear roles, and mission cohesion. Notable insights by Richard Hackman highlight that a team's effectiveness stems from stable membership and mutual accountability rather than superficial bonding activities. Strategies, including collaborative planning and creating a team charter, are proposed to enhance team performance, especially in international settings like Atlassian, which faces unique communication challenges.

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Full Transcript

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00:02:24 Speaker_12
It was the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, and the U.S. men's hockey team was facing off against the Soviets. On paper, the winner looked obvious. The Soviet team had won gold in four straight Olympics.

00:02:37 Speaker_12
Just a year earlier, they'd beaten the NHL All-Star team. And just three days before the Olympics started, the Soviets had destroyed the U.S. team 10 to 3.

00:02:45 Speaker_02
Yeah, they were the best. You know, it could beat you at the top end of their lineup or they could beat you at the back end of their lineup.

00:02:53 Speaker_12
John Harrington was on the U.S. team. They knew the odds were stacked against them.

00:02:58 Speaker_02
At that time, it wasn't like, hey, we think we can win this thing. It was like, we're hoping to get to the medal round. And I think we rallied around that feeling that we were underdogs.

00:03:07 Speaker_12
That might've given them an extra boost, because as the games began, the U.S. team started winning and upsetting higher-ranked teams.

00:03:14 Speaker_02
And I think as games went on, each game went on, we were getting better as a group. We were getting more confident as a group.

00:03:22 Speaker_12
All of a sudden, they found themselves in the medal round, facing down the Soviet team. To have a shot at gold, they had to beat the best team in the world. Team captain Mike Aruzioni remembers the anticipation in the locker room.

00:03:37 Speaker_08
It was quiet. This is the biggest game we'd ever played and it's quiet. Nobody in the world thought we could win.

00:03:45 Speaker_12
The Soviets scored early on, the U.S. matched it, and the game continued neck and neck.

00:03:51 Speaker_02
And I remember as that game went on, you're still almost thinking like, hey, at any time, these guys can fill up the back of the net. So it was like playing every second. We had to be at the top of our game or things might go wrong.

00:04:05 Speaker_12
Then came the deciding moment in the last period. The game was tied three to three. John passed to a teammate, who passed to Mike, who took a shot and... Well, I'm glad it went in.

00:04:24 Speaker_02
The arena went absolutely nuts. I mean, it absolutely went crazy. And it was just like, holy smokes, like, here we are. Like, this dream we all had about going to the Olympics and being successful and winning a gold medal, like, we were there.

00:04:38 Speaker_02
We were getting there, and it was possible.

00:04:41 Speaker_12
Somehow, the team managed to hang on for the last 10 minutes. Then announcer Al Michaels made his famous call.

00:04:48 Speaker_10
You believe in miracles? Yes!

00:04:51 Speaker_08
Yeah, I always kid Al Michaels. I said, Al, you know, it wasn't a miracle, but that's a really catchy phrase.

00:04:58 Speaker_12
The game became known as the Miracle on Ice. You've probably heard the story or seen the movie. But what you haven't heard is the science that helps to illuminate how the U.S. team won. It's not just relevant to winning a gold medal.

00:05:12 Speaker_12
It can also bring out the best in us and make our own teams better. I'm Adam Grant, and this is Work Life, my podcast with its head audio collective. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck.

00:05:34 Speaker_12
In this show, we explore how to unlock the potential in people and workplaces. Today, team effectiveness and how to make a group more than the sum of its parts.

00:05:54 Speaker_14
What I was really preoccupied with was, how come the groups that I am in always seem to suck so bad? And that I wanted to understand because there was possibly a personal relevance there.

00:06:11 Speaker_12
Richard Hackman was the world's leading expert on teams, and even he couldn't make them work. Richard was one of my mentors. Back in 2001, I had no idea what to do with my psychology major.

00:06:23 Speaker_12
Then I took his class on organizational psychology, and I was hooked. He dazzled us with his studies of teams in a wide range of settings, from airline cockpit crews to symphony orchestras to government intelligence units.

00:06:37 Speaker_12
Richard passed away in 2013, so I couldn't record a conversation with him, but we do have some archival audio. He once explained his struggles with teams on the People and Projects podcast.

00:06:48 Speaker_13
Well, of course, it is widely known that people who study something can't practice it.

00:06:55 Speaker_13
I mean, you know, shrinks are crazy, marriage counselors get divorced, shoemakers' kids have holes in their soles, and people who study groups are probably terrible at actually leading or being in groups. I find them frustrating beyond belief.

00:07:08 Speaker_12
Many of Richard's peers believed that the secret to improving groups was team-building exercises. They assumed that icebreakers and bonding activities fueled liking and helped groups collaborate effectively.

00:07:20 Speaker_12
I'm guessing you probably know a few managers who still have the same theory, and you've probably had to suffer through a lot of name games and escape rooms as a result. But Richard wasn't sold. He thought we had cause and effect backward.

00:07:33 Speaker_13
A lot of people will go out and say, oh, the problem with this team is there's a lot of conflict and there's mistrust in one another. So what we will do are trust exercises to build trust.

00:07:44 Speaker_13
And there really is a cart-horse problem here, because trust really is important. I agree with that. But trust emerges from a team that is operating well. It doesn't work the other way around.

00:07:57 Speaker_12
Sure enough, the evidence shows that teams don't have to sing kumbaya together to start excelling together. It's not liking that drives performance. It's often high performance that leads people to get along.

00:08:09 Speaker_12
And high performance is the result of good team design. Richard explained this in a Lifetime Achievement Award speech.

00:08:17 Speaker_14
This is a caricature, but the basic message is true. 60% of the variance in how well a team's going to do is determined before the group members even meet, okay? It's whether you've got the right conditions in place. Let that sink in.

00:08:32 Speaker_12
Team design is more important than team dynamics. And many groups aren't designed to be real teams. Think about the teams you've been on at work.

00:08:43 Speaker_12
How often are they built for collaboration, with everyone working toward a shared purpose, versus just happening to share an office and some projects? Some of Richard's key design conditions aren't common practice, but they are common sense.

00:08:58 Speaker_12
For starters, you need a clear who, what, and how. The who is stable membership, a group of people who stay together. The what is a compelling goal that creates a sense of purpose, And the how is a unique role well-suited to each member.

00:09:16 Speaker_12
But there are a couple design conditions that aren't intuitive. And you can see them in the miracle on ice.

00:09:23 Speaker_02
Mike Ruggioni was the captain of our 1980 Olympic hockey team. And of course, known to all of us on our Olympic team as Mike Holiday Anna Ruggioni because he's America's guest. He has been for going on 43 years now.

00:09:36 Speaker_08
I swear to God, I've never heard him say that or anybody. I don't know where he came up with that. It must be a way to promote himself.

00:09:44 Speaker_11
He made some kind of comment about how you've never had to pay for a hotel, given your hero status.

00:09:51 Speaker_08
I have to have a talk with him. He should see my expense bill.

00:09:54 Speaker_02
No, he seriously has done a tremendous job and was a great leader for us and a great captain and certainly somebody who was still as great a team player with all of our guys as he was in 1980.

00:10:08 Speaker_12
Mike was 25. That made him one of the two most seasoned guys on the team. The US didn't have the luxury of recruiting the most experienced players. The team was full of amateurs. Most were still in college, and several were as young as 19 and 20.

00:10:23 Speaker_12
You know, we were the youngest Olympic team I think at this point we'd ever put on the ice. Our first instinct is often that a great team should be full of experienced players. If you're in tech, you want to form a crew of seasoned coders.

00:10:35 Speaker_12
If you're in sales, you hope to assemble a group of salespeople with decades of practice under their belts. But when you're designing a team, you actually don't need the most experienced individuals.

00:10:46 Speaker_12
You want to design a group around shared experience, as Richard explained.

00:10:50 Speaker_13
The one that often gets overlooked is we need to learn how to work together when there is really a liability to newness.

00:10:58 Speaker_12
Research shows that teams are more likely to excel when they've spent more time training and working together. You can see it in studies of software development teams. They do faster, higher quality work after they've collaborated for months or years.

00:11:12 Speaker_12
The stakes of shared experience can be very high. Take flight crews. There's evidence that well-rested crews that haven't flown together before make more potentially catastrophic errors than exhausted crews that have just flown together.

00:11:29 Speaker_12
Even if you're tired, shared experience improves communication.

00:11:34 Speaker_12
And cardiac surgeons who do all their procedures with a core team at one hospital are about 10% less likely to lose a patient than surgeons who split their time between different teams at different hospitals.

00:11:47 Speaker_13
There's a general view that after a team has been together for a while, they'll start to get a little too relaxed and too accepting of each other's foibles and errors and so forth. There really isn't empirical evidence for that.

00:11:59 Speaker_13
What you see instead is the team continuing to get better at a decreasing rate, but continuing to get better over time.

00:12:07 Speaker_12
Shared experience allows people to leverage each other's strengths, compensate for each other's weaknesses, and build effective routines. It's especially clear in sports.

00:12:17 Speaker_12
NBA basketball teams win more games once they played multiple seasons together, in part because they get better at coordinating their plays. You can see that up close in The Miracle on Ice.

00:12:29 Speaker_12
Leading up to the 1980 Olympics, many members of the Soviet team had played together before. But even though the US team was new, one of their secret weapons was that they had a lot of history together. The U.S.

00:12:41 Speaker_12
Olympic coach, Herb Brooks, recruited players with shared experience. Of the 20 guys on the final roster, nine had played for Herb at Minnesota, and four more had played together in Boston.

00:12:53 Speaker_08
Well, I think the big thing for us to play with the Minnesota kids is they played under Herb. So they, you know, when we thought Herb was, you know, bat crazy, they would just kind of laugh at us and explain this is what he does.

00:13:04 Speaker_08
So it was very helpful being with the Minnesota kids because they knew Herb's antics. And on the other side of the coin, it was great to have the, you know, the full Boston guys there because we knew each other, we played against each other.

00:13:15 Speaker_08
We grew up in the same, basically pretty much the same neighborhoods. You know, I, I'd known Jack O'Callaghan since he was 14 or 15 years old. So. You know, having that atmosphere for us as local guys was helpful.

00:13:29 Speaker_12
They had experience together before the whole team even met for the first time. What Herb did is called a lift-out, recruiting an intact team. This is effective far beyond sports.

00:13:40 Speaker_12
In startups, instead of just launching a company with their friends, co-founders get along better if they've worked together in the past.

00:13:48 Speaker_12
And on Wall Street, research shows that if you poach a star security analyst from another firm, it takes an average of five years for them to recover their outstanding performance.

00:13:57 Speaker_12
But if you hire their team with them, they maintain their star status from day one. Of course, you don't always have the opportunity to recruit a team with shared experience. But you can build it by having the team practice and perform together.

00:14:12 Speaker_12
If you're setting up a team of data scientists, have them go through training together. If you're forming a board committee, role play some decisions together. And if you're building a hockey team, form a line that stays together.

00:14:26 Speaker_08
Nobody could play with those three clowns. Harrington, Schneider, and Pavlich. They were the only line, I think, that stayed together all year because they each knew each other so well and where they were going and what they were doing.

00:14:38 Speaker_12
They became known as the Conehead Line. John was one of them.

00:14:42 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, that's a funny thing. You know, I think Mark Pavlat said at one time, he goes, you know, we might as well be cones out here because we never get to play on the power play, you know, and maybe they could use us for cones.

00:14:57 Speaker_11
Why did your line play together so well?

00:15:00 Speaker_02
Like I know, like certainly I played with Mark Pavlich in college and we had played together and both were kind of rink rat guys and outdoor hockey guys who understood how to play in small spaces and move the puck.

00:15:14 Speaker_02
And then Mark Pavlich, his hometown was like four miles from mine and Bud Schneider's was like 20 miles from my hometown. So we're all from the same area up there and grew up playing the same way.

00:15:25 Speaker_02
as the season wore on in that Olympic year and stuck together. So we got to understand each other's games a little bit better and certainly gain confidence in our ability to play the game for Herb.

00:15:37 Speaker_12
That's so interesting. I never thought about that. It was pretty clear to me that the guys who had been on a college team together would have benefited from shared experience. They had some familiar routines.

00:15:46 Speaker_12
They knew each other's strengths and weaknesses. It did not dawn on me that the fact that a lot of you guys grew up playing basically the same style of hockey in the same places also kind of spoke the same language.

00:15:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, it did, you know, and I knew as a younger player too, like, I mean, when I'm learning the game, when you're playing with friends and playing on an outdoor rink or on a pond, I mean, you're watching the older guys and going, how are they playing?

00:16:12 Speaker_02
I want to be like them.

00:16:14 Speaker_12
Another design condition that many people miss is shared responsibility. Extensive evidence reveals that the bond between people is less important than their bond around a mission. In other words, mission cohesion matters more than social cohesion.

00:16:30 Speaker_12
And what creates that cohesion around a mission is shared responsibility. This is one of the reasons why team bonding activities are often ineffective.

00:16:39 Speaker_12
If you and your teammates don't have a shared goal that you're invested in together, your team will still flounder no matter how much you like each other. Herb Brooks didn't worry much about the relationship between his hockey players.

00:16:51 Speaker_12
He focused on their responsibility to the team.

00:16:54 Speaker_02
Yeah, I think that was certainly one of the things that he had to do early in our season was to convince everybody that what's on the front of your jersey, the USA, is more important than what's on the back, your own name, and that we have to play together.

00:17:09 Speaker_02
And he certainly did a great job of making us believe that as the season went on.

00:17:14 Speaker_11
I love the front of the jersey is more important than the back. It's such a powerful illustration of what we often talk about in my world of putting your mission above your ego.

00:17:23 Speaker_02
Well, exactly. And we certainly had to do that on our team, Adam. I mean, we had great individual players, but we had to play together. And when we played together, I think we needed to be greater than those individual parts.

00:17:38 Speaker_12
They had an important mission of representing America. To reinforce that the outcome was in their hands, Herb gave them an extra common enemy, him.

00:17:48 Speaker_08
Herb always stressed to us, everybody has a job and a role and understand what that is and we'll be a team. And I think Herb created that chemistry for us because it was always us against him.

00:18:00 Speaker_08
He started out from the beginning when he said, I'll be your coach, but I won't be your friend. So it was really upon us to bond and come together knowing that it was gonna be us against Herb.

00:18:09 Speaker_08
He was very demanding and that I think the way he coached us made us come together even quicker. One key moment happened after an exhibition game. So we played Norway in Norway. The game ended, it actually ended in a 3-3 tie.

00:18:26 Speaker_08
And we started to skate off the ice and then all of a sudden Herb's out there and he blew the whistle and he brought us down to one end of the rink and we started to proceed to do the Herbies.

00:18:34 Speaker_12
Herb wasn't happy with their performance, so he gave them a challenge to face together. A tough skating drill that became known as the Herbies.

00:18:42 Speaker_02
It was goal line to the near blue line and back to the goal line, and then to the red line and back to the blue line, then to the far blue line and back to the goal line, and then all the way down to the end boards and all the way back.

00:18:53 Speaker_02
Then we'd stretch.

00:18:54 Speaker_08
Then he blew the whistle and we did him again for 15 minutes and then... We stretched and he blew the whistle and we did him again.

00:19:00 Speaker_02
It was tiring and it was tough. But I think that was a drill that was always somewhere between doing conditioning and doing punishment. So he kept everybody out there.

00:19:14 Speaker_02
And then I remember the arena guy, the arena ice guy, was up in the corner screaming in Norwegian. I think he wanted to go home. He turned the lights out.

00:19:23 Speaker_08
And then I remember the drill ending, because guys were smashing their stick against the boards. We were pretty pissed off. And then Herb said, if I hear another goddamn stick smashed against the boards, you'll skate till you die.

00:19:34 Speaker_08
Well, nobody said a word, and we finished the drills. We went back in the locker room, and we had to play Norway the next day. And Herb said, if you play this way again tomorrow, you're going to skate again. They didn't play that way again.

00:19:46 Speaker_12
The next night, the U.S. crushed Norway 9-0.

00:19:51 Speaker_02
So maybe Herbie made his point.

00:19:54 Speaker_11
I wonder if, you know, some of that was, let me put these guys under adversity together and see if that brings them together.

00:20:02 Speaker_02
Yeah, I think it does.

00:20:04 Speaker_02
And I think he wanted to show everybody he was going to treat everybody the same, that there weren't going to be any favorites on the team, that we're all in this together and that everybody played for everybody else, that they understood that we wouldn't be successful if we didn't try to play together.

00:20:21 Speaker_02
And I also knew that, you know, he expected us and wanted us to be the best condition team, but he also wanted us to be the mentally toughest team too.

00:20:31 Speaker_02
And I think that, uh, everybody would always remember that lesson in Oslo there that, uh, we have to be able to bring it when we're in the heat of the battle, because.

00:20:42 Speaker_02
Eventually we were going to get the late placer where you wouldn't get a second chance. It wouldn't matter if you did stops and starts or Herbie's or lightenings after the game. If the game was lost, you couldn't get it back.

00:20:53 Speaker_12
Herb's methods were a little intense, but there's something to be said for creating collective challenges as one way to design for shared responsibility. A second approach is to flesh out a common identity.

00:21:07 Speaker_12
This means focusing on what's central, distinctive, and enduring to the team. For example, you could invite members to create a team name, a vision, and a set of shared values.

00:21:18 Speaker_12
Evidence from nonprofit professional theaters suggests that which identity the team chooses is less important than whether they're aligned together or rounded.

00:21:28 Speaker_12
A third option is to reinforce the importance of the goal and of each person's unique contribution. I found in my research that it's not enough to just talk about how the work will make a difference.

00:21:39 Speaker_12
It's more effective to bring in a customer, a client, or an end user to speak firsthand about why the work matters. That underscores the meaning of the task and reminds the team that others are depending on them to succeed. The U.S.

00:21:53 Speaker_12
hockey team had a whole country counting on them. Their shared responsibility and shared experience helped them bring out the best in one another, which enabled them to beat the Soviets and then win gold.

00:22:06 Speaker_02
Honestly, God, I sit there and watch that and I get goosebumps when I watch that.

00:22:11 Speaker_11
I could see you getting chills. I mean, it's amazing even just to watch your reaction watching it 43 years later.

00:22:18 Speaker_02
Yeah, you never get tired of watching that and never get tired of what happened in the games and that experience and having to be a part of it is certainly the greatest thing that's happened to me as a hockey player.

00:22:29 Speaker_02
We had individual parts and we had players that played different ways and different systems and came from different areas of the country.

00:22:35 Speaker_02
But over that course of the year, uh, we grew together as a team and we grew together as, you know, as, as teammates and, uh, people who just. When we played together, we somehow could make it greater, uh, than we, than we could do individually.

00:22:52 Speaker_12
You could see it at the medal ceremony, when Mike went up to accept the gold medal as the team captain.

00:22:57 Speaker_08
I'm standing on the podium after the flag and after the anthem and my teammates are looking at me and I'm looking at them. So for me, it was a reaction just to call them up and we all fit on it.

00:23:09 Speaker_08
I don't think we'd all fit on it today, but we all fit on it then.

00:23:13 Speaker_12
Good design is only part of the recipe. Once you have shared experience and shared responsibility in place, how do you launch a team to set them up for success? And if they start to struggle, how do you intervene to turn things around?

00:23:28 Speaker_12
More on that after the break.

00:23:40 Speaker_04
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00:23:43 Speaker_04
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00:23:56 Speaker_04
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00:24:10 Speaker_12
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00:24:41 Speaker_12
The first time I went to meet with Richard Hackman about it, he was sitting at his desk with his feet on the table. No shoes, just socks.

00:24:49 Speaker_06
So he liked to take off his shoes. So he would be frequently, you know, viewed walking with his shoes off. He had a sweet tooth.

00:24:57 Speaker_06
So to get him to read my paper, I would clip a candy bar to it with a note saying, don't eat this until you're reading my paper, you know, to get his feedback.

00:25:06 Speaker_11
Yeah. Sounded like you were describing a dog more than a human. No shoes, must use treats to motivate.

00:25:13 Speaker_05
That's right. Exactly. Well, you know, there's some of those things in all of us, probably.

00:25:18 Speaker_12
Anita Woolley is an organizational behavior professor at Carnegie Mellon. She was one of Richard's proteges, and she's now one of the world's foremost authorities on teams.

00:25:29 Speaker_12
When Anita started working with Richard, they were fascinated by team beginnings.

00:25:33 Speaker_14
The quality of the launch of the group, that is what happens when the members first come together.

00:25:40 Speaker_12
Anita and Richard collaborated on a study to see if a simple intervention at launch would help teams work better together. They pre-screened thousands of people and formed teams. Some teams were staffed with multiple experts.

00:25:54 Speaker_12
Others were given no experts at all. Then they gave all the teams a task.

00:26:00 Speaker_06
And it was a counterterrorism scenario that we came up with based on a combination of cases that we had seen in our intelligence community work. So there was a ground truth. We knew what happened.

00:26:11 Speaker_12
Each team was supposed to solve the case. And surprisingly, when teams of experts were left to their own devices, they actually performed worse than teams without experts that had one little design advantage.

00:26:24 Speaker_12
Instead of diving right into the task, the successful teams had been randomly assigned to do a collaborative planning exercise. They talked about who would be responsible for what and how they would integrate their knowledge.

00:26:37 Speaker_12
Team planning led to a successful launch.

00:26:40 Speaker_06
And it was just a matter of setting the groundwork and the norms and giving them a kind of script to follow for how to work together.

00:26:48 Speaker_06
And I think it's played out a lot actually in other teams I've been part of, you know, and I have make all the student teams do that. Students regularly will say, wow, this was one of the best teams I've ever been on.

00:27:00 Speaker_06
I don't know what you did, all the magic and composing. And I'm like, It's actually, it's not really magic. It's kind of pretty basic, but it's pretty powerful.

00:27:14 Speaker_12
Anita guides them to create a team charter together. This is basically a team manual, a document that maps out goals, roles, and routines. Does your team have one?

00:27:25 Speaker_12
The not-so-magical formula for a good charter is the same as the one for good team design. Who, what, and how.

00:27:34 Speaker_06
So when we think about team design, we think about who's in the team, what they're trying to do, and how they're going to work together. How are they going to be structured in terms of decision making?

00:27:43 Speaker_06
How are they going to actually combine their inputs? And even if you assume everybody is on the same page about all of those things, I think often you're surprised as you start to talk about them, you realize that you're not.

00:27:56 Speaker_06
People had different assumptions, and it's just hugely valuable to clarify that as early as possible.

00:28:04 Speaker_12
We all know the value of post-mortems when things don't go right. But my favorite part of a team charter conversation turns that idea upside down. Before the work begins, you do a pre-mortem.

00:28:16 Speaker_12
Imagine that your team has crashed and burned, and discuss the most likely causes. There's evidence that a pre-mortem can help to prevent overconfidence and promote better routines.

00:28:27 Speaker_06
You know, you kind of think, visualize the future and you failed and how did you fail? Why did you fail? What did you do wrong?

00:28:36 Speaker_06
You know, it's really powerful how that change in perspective can really reveal new ideas that you wouldn't have thought about before. So absolutely kind of trying to project forward I think is a very important piece.

00:28:52 Speaker_12
Yeah, I'm a big fan of them, and I think it's so much more effective to anticipate problems and prevent them than it is to have to solve them later.

00:29:03 Speaker_06
Ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure.

00:29:07 Speaker_12
Benjamin Franklin. There you go.

00:29:10 Speaker_06
And he's still right.

00:29:12 Speaker_12
Once your team is off and running, it still needs help to thrive. Sometimes it's clear when a team is struggling, but not always. Richard Hackman found that if you want to know how your team is doing, it's not enough to consider performance.

00:29:26 Speaker_12
A manager or coach should also monitor learning and well-being. Are people growing together and enjoying the experience, or are they hating each other's guts and feeling like they're stagnating? And you also need to look at viability.

00:29:40 Speaker_12
Is the team going to be capable of working together in the future, or are they burning bridges as they go? If your team isn't quite there, you might need an intervention.

00:29:52 Speaker_12
Often, when we think about fixing a team, our first impulse is to swap people in and out or coach specific members. But what's more useful is coaching people together as a team and looking at problems with collaboration.

00:30:05 Speaker_06
Absolutely. And I mean, clearly there could be individual deficiencies and sort of a technical skill or whatever. So, you know, those should definitely be addressed.

00:30:15 Speaker_06
But sometimes when we're looking at a group, even if we're talking about conflict or pick your favorite group, disease, sometimes there is a system-level contributor that would take care of a lot of things that seem individual-level, right?

00:30:34 Speaker_06
So, for example, there could be somebody who has skills that are not being utilized because of other norms in the group. And so then that person gets to be difficult. They start being very irritable. They don't show up.

00:30:49 Speaker_06
They don't deliver what they are supposed to do because they feel disrespected and whatever. And so if you were going to try to coach that person to fix the problem, it wouldn't probably fix the problem, right?

00:31:00 Speaker_06
So at least considering the system-level issues is an important piece to really getting at the heart of what might be happening.

00:31:09 Speaker_11
Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of saying to a conflict mediator, you have two people who are having a fight.

00:31:16 Speaker_12
You can talk to each of them, but you're never going to talk to them together. Not going to work.

00:31:20 Speaker_06
And probably even more difficult, there's probably some other pieces to their shared context that are contributing that are going to be hard to really detect or figure out, yeah.

00:31:34 Speaker_09
Can we just go around and introduce ourselves? Sure. My name's Alex.

00:31:37 Speaker_07
My name's Emily. Kaylee.

00:31:39 Speaker_09
My name's Javier.

00:31:40 Speaker_07
I'm Judy and I'm based out of the Bay Area.

00:31:43 Speaker_12
This is a marketing team at Atlassian, the company behind software like Jira and Confluence. Their specialty is collaboration. They make tools for teams.

00:31:54 Speaker_12
So it's not surprising that they have an international reputation for their excellence in running their own self-managed teams. This team has gathered for a coaching session, led by the company's resident work futurist, Dom Price.

00:32:07 Speaker_09
Awesome. Just to wrap things up, I'm not in this team, but I'm your facilitator for today, Dom Price. I'm joining you from sunny Sydney. The team just started working together a few weeks before this call.

00:32:17 Speaker_12
On a recent offsite, they did what Atlassian calls a team health monitor. The health monitor is our diagnostic that teams do to get a feel for how they're working. This is similar to the kind of team monitoring that Richard Hackman suggested.

00:32:31 Speaker_12
The Atlassian team found they were struggling with coordination and communication. Most crucially, they hadn't decided where and how to make decisions. They wound up retracing each other's steps and relitigating choices that were already made.

00:32:45 Speaker_12
To make this more difficult, they were scattered across different time zones.

00:32:49 Speaker_09
And because they're so spread out around the world, they were just missing those conversations. They all arrived with the assumption of going, I assume we'll just work the way my old team worked. And you're like, yeah, no.

00:33:00 Speaker_09
Unfortunately, you've now glued together seven different ways of working and it doesn't work. And so it's like, OK, time out. Let's have an agreement.

00:33:09 Speaker_12
Specifically, they needed agreements on where to have different types of conversations.

00:33:13 Speaker_00
Like, I don't think we have any of those standards in place. So we're all over the place right now. Me, especially. I'm number one guilty. I'm terrible at Slack.

00:33:22 Speaker_00
So short conversations, really long conversations, like full text posts, like decisions, like all of that happens on Slack. Some team members liked casual spur of the moment calls.

00:33:35 Speaker_15
I will choose to slack cuddle over write anything, but I am, there is a method to the madness.

00:33:41 Speaker_15
If I don't think it needs to be documented and if I don't think there's certain steps to getting to whatever the discussion is, I will always choose to slack cuddle.

00:33:50 Speaker_15
I feel a little bit closer to the person and then it's a little bit less formal than Zoom. I tell people it's like speaking on a walkie talkie and you're just going back and forth and just getting ideas flowing or just catching up.

00:34:03 Speaker_12
Other team members wanted more official communication, because without it, they ended up redoing a bunch of work.

00:34:09 Speaker_07
Sometimes I get nervous with huddles or like these exam chats. It's because there's no way for me to document or reference back. You know what I mean? Like we might have relied on something.

00:34:20 Speaker_07
And then what I have to do anyways, if it's a bigger thing, is recap what we just said. And so that's just an extra step.

00:34:27 Speaker_09
Yeah. So, Judy, make that a standard for me. Let's give Javi a role that says, Javi, you can do your slack huddles because they work for you. And we want you to be the best version of you, Javi. We want you to have those chats.

00:34:38 Speaker_15
Thank you, Dan.

00:34:38 Speaker_09
But I can't have those decisions sat in secret, sat in a brain bubble somewhere. So the Atlassian team came to a compromise.

00:34:46 Speaker_09
So we're going to give everyone the law, the rule, not the law, we can't make laws, everyone the rule that if we're in a slack huddle and we make an infrontal decision, that's a good thing, but not if no one else knows about it.

00:34:56 Speaker_09
So any decision needs to be documented decisions and shared with impacted, yeah? Because none of us want a team with an upset program manager who doesn't know the decision that we've made. They'll make our life hell.

00:35:07 Speaker_12
These kinds of conversations could happen individually. But when they happen as a team, there's an opportunity to bring out the best in everyone's working styles.

00:35:16 Speaker_09
If you do it individually, what tends to happen is the leader decides the communication channel in the meetings. And you're like, OK, if you say that's how we're doing it, I think it's terrible, but we'll do it and I'll pretend it's fine, right?

00:35:27 Speaker_09
It's very top down. What you would have noticed in that exercise is sometimes I got Javier to lead, sometimes I got Alex to lead, sometimes I got Emily to lead. You know what? It's a team activity. The team turns up to these meetings.

00:35:39 Speaker_09
The team is in these channels communicating. So we're always solving for the team.

00:35:48 Speaker_12
Think of the multiverse where this Atlassian team doesn't pause and have this conversation. Maybe you've been in that multiverse. They get stuck in loops, wasting time redoing work. Resentment builds.

00:35:59 Speaker_12
A team intervention can help to head off tensions before they start to fester.

00:36:05 Speaker_09
Something everyone goes, ah, like you can even see during the session, people going, ah, like stuff that we just thought, I thought I'd said that out loud already and I hadn't. And then when you say it out loud, people really recognize it.

00:36:17 Speaker_09
So that's, that's how a lot of these plays go. It's, it's stuff that you already knew that you just get to surface, but you then get to resolve that gives you a better way of working.

00:36:29 Speaker_12
Empirically, team coaching tends to be most effective at inflection points. And these tend to happen at certain predictable times. In particular, the midpoint. That's when teams become more open to changing up their strategy and process.

00:36:44 Speaker_06
they also have enough information about the work to have insights about maybe what changes would be useful. But you really have to force that process too.

00:36:54 Speaker_06
So when I do it with teams that I work with, I have the members individually do an evaluation of things and then I give them an aggregated report that sort of compares them to some norm and says, okay, are we using members' skills very well?

00:37:12 Speaker_06
Do you feel like your skills are utilized? Or where are we falling short? Do we all agree on what we're still trying to do? Do we still think that's the right direction? And how about the ways we're working together? You know, are they effective?

00:37:28 Speaker_12
The key to better teams isn't magic. It's also not a miracle. Sometimes it just takes a little prompt to reflect and evolve.

00:37:37 Speaker_06
Humans kind of have these sources of inertia, you know, where they don't want to bring things up or maybe they don't want to open conversations, but it doesn't take much to get them to do it.

00:37:50 Speaker_12
Richard Hackman would be the first to tell you that he never really mastered working in groups. But thanks to his research and the work of his protégés, we know a lot about how to help teams work better.

00:38:02 Speaker_12
Richard believed passionately that designing a great team wasn't just about producing great results. It was also about creating meaningful experiences.

00:38:11 Speaker_13
What happens to the team itself over time? Does it grow in capability? Is it a better performing unit? And what happens to the individuals? Did they learn something? Did they grow and develop professionally?

00:38:24 Speaker_13
Was this a waste of their time or something that frustrated and alienated them? The greatest teams of any kind are the ones that get better over time and that provide a setting in which individual members can continue to learn and grow.

00:38:52 Speaker_12
This episode was produced by Daphne Chen. Our team includes Courtney Guarino, Constanza Gallardo, Dan O'Donnell, Greta Cohn, Grace Rubinstein, Daniela Balarezo, Benben Cheng, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Roxanne Highlash.

00:39:06 Speaker_12
Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our show is mixed by Ben Shano. Original music by Hans Dale Sue and Alison Leighton Brown. Ad stories produced by Pineapple Street Studios. Special gratitude to the late, great Richard Hackman for all his wisdom.

00:39:20 Speaker_12
We miss you, Uncle Richard. For Richard's audio clips, big shout-outs to Andy Kaufman's People and Projects podcast, and the Academy of Management's Organizational Behavior Division.

00:39:31 Speaker_12
And thanks to Christine Parker and the Atlassian team for letting us listen in. For their research, appreciation of the following lead authors and their colleagues. Rebecca Grossman on Team Cohesion. Clayton Foushee on Flight Crews.

00:39:44 Speaker_12
Ralph Katz and Robert Huckman on Shared Experience and Software Teams. Huckman and Gary Pisano on Cardiac Surgery Teams. Sean Berman on NBA Teams. Boris Groisberg on Wall Street Analysts and Liftouts. Noam Wasserman on Founders.

00:39:58 Speaker_12
Chris DeJager on Common Enemy Effects. Stuart Albert and David Whetton on Identity, Zanny Voss on Identity Alignment, Beth Vynott on Premortems, Connie Gersick on Midpoint Transitions, and Ruth Waggeman on Team Coaching.

00:40:11 Speaker_12
Also, John Gilbert for writing about the miracle on ice.

00:40:25 Speaker_11
the nostalgia's gotta be tricky. I guess I've met some people over the years who feel like, okay, I had a peak moment that I will never experience anything like it again.

00:40:34 Speaker_11
And there's a part of me that always wants to be back there, but there's a part of me that also appreciates how rare and special that was. How do you think about that?

00:40:43 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, the first thing I say about that is like it happened so long ago, people ask me about that and about talking about it. And I say, well, you know, the older we get, the better we were.